I'd like to take this opportunity to offer a proud Clenched Fist Up The Ass Salute to the perverse corporate assholes at Yahoo! and their attempts to create a technological master race...

The other day, Kristi told me about Yahoo! LAUNCHcast, Yahoo's fully customizable radio system, which, among other things, lets you fully engineer your perfect radio station by rating each song that it plays from "Don't ever play this awful crap to me again!", to "OMFG I live for this shit!!"... which, when you think about it, is a pretty cool idea - how often do you listen to traditional radio, and wish they'd stop playing a particular song you hate, or play more of specific bands you like?

So anyways, curious, I tried to visit the LAUNCHchat website.

At this point, they hit me with the first of my two largest internet pet hates - you must use Internet Explorer to access this site.

FUCK YOU!! There is NOTHING in today's internet world that IE can do that any other major browser can not. There is NO legitimate fucking reason anymore to lock sites down to one browser, forsaking all others. And furthermore, Internet Explorer is shit!!!

Now, by forcing people to use IE (which, if you ask me, raises some serious antitrust questions whenever I see it!), you're also effectively saying that your customers should preferably be Windows users. Granted, it's possible these days to download and install Internet Explorer for Linux or Mac. But why would you? The only reason IE is still the most prominently used browser is because it comes with Windows! Informed internet users don't use the damn thing! And certainly the number of people that would go out of their way to download it if they use an OS with which it is not pre-packaged would be extremely low.

Anyways, I resisted for a couple of days, but hearing Kristi constantly talking about how great the listening is, I eventually relented, and fired up IE to check it out.

The first thing I noticed was that as a free listener, the sound quality is terrible. I mean really, it was like listening to somebody play music on a 30yr old sound system with one busted speaker, in another room, with aluminium foil stuffed in my ears. And that was on the "Medium" quality setting. Trying to pump it to "High" quality tells me I need to be a paying member to experience that. Fair enough then.

So, I tinker with it a little, and though it seemed buggy as hell (I had a nightmare of a time actually getting the radio console to update the track information when the next song came on, which completely defeated the purpose of the rating system!), the concept still appealed to me. And I was told I could try the paid version (LAUNCHcast plus) free for a week, so I thought, what the hey, I'll check it out.

Clicking the free trial link, I see this beauty:-
<blockquote>TRY IT FREE FOR 7 DAYS*

Choose a plan:

$2.99/mo.$35.99 billed annually

$3.99/mo.billed monthly
</blockquote>
Now really, what the fuck?? Seven day "free" trial with automatic credit card rebilling after the trial period?? Come ON, I'd expect this from a shady porno site, or even a warez site, but from Yahoo, one of the internet's industry leaders?? Yuck!!

But hey, I umm'ed and ahh'ed over it, and figured shit, even if they do rebill me, what's four bucks anyway? So I hit the sign up button. Only to be hit with my second, and biggest, internet pet hate of all time:-

"Thank you for your interest in LAUNCHcast Plus. At this time, we do not offer LAUNCHcast Plus outside the U.S. We are working to offer the Plus service in other territories as soon as reasonably possible."

Now I'm sorry, but FUCK YOU, YOU RACIST PIECES OF SHIT.

I have absolutely ZERO tolerance for this kind of bullshit. I mean COME ON. This is the fucking internet! The global community! We live in an age where an old woman in Slovenia can sell hand woven shawls all over the globe without having to leave her own home, and yet one of the biggest companies in the world says I can only listen to the free version of their radio station, but not the paid version, because I happen to be logging in from outside the continental USA?

No, FUCK YOU, Yahoo. This is bullshit. It's discrimination, plain and simple. It's just a way of saying that you have to be an American Windows/Internet Explorer user to enjoy their services. This is no better than if they blocked their services from people who aren't white. Or earn less than a certain level of income. Or aren't voting Republicans. This is technological bigotry at its worst.

Everybody does it, though. By leading with this example, as one of the "big guns" of internet business, they send the message that this is okay. So many times recently, I've been hunting for rare items on eBay, only to find that there's only one person in the whole world selling what I'm wanting, and it's an American who refuses to ship outside the USA. For the love of God, why?? The buyer pays all shipping fees!! Shipping to an international address carries absolutely no extra effort nor expense to the seller!! So why the hell would you want to limit your business like that??

Once, I went to the effort of emailing a seller who had something particularly rare that I wanted particularly badly, and asking him if he'd please lift the restriction, or at the very least, if the current listing didn't sell, re-list it with global shipping. He flat out refused, but tried to talk me into buying it outside of eBay - he literally just gave me his postal address, and said "I don't take PayPal, but send money to this address, and I'll send you the item". I told him to shove it, of course. I may not be an American citizen, but that doesn't mean I fell off the last stupid foreigner wagon.

I have to say though, things are getting better - slowly. In the last decade or so, since I came to the internet, great strides in diversity have been made. Industry leaders like PayPal, eBay, Google and so on, have released geographically targeted versions of their websites, with local support. The operating system and web browser industries have diversified to the point where all but your most rudimentary of net newbies know they have a choice in what they use to surf the web with, and no longer do you have to be a hardcore tech geek to use a Unix/Linux based OS. The online world is realising, slowly, that there really is a whole world of potential customers out there, and many of them value their freedom of choice.

But when an internet giant like Yahoo turns around and says that only Internet Exploring Americans are allowed to use their services, it just kicks the whole movement back ten years. Would it be tolerated in today's world if a big company set a policy that their black employees weren't permitted to use the white's drinking fountains? Or if they openly enforced that the only positions they'd hire a woman for were secretarial positions, for which the employee would be paid less than minimum wage and forced to wear revealing clothing? Hell no! If something like that became public, there'd be a fucking uproar. And yet companies like Yahoo are still getting away with pushing a technological bias on us instead. I don't use Internet Explorer, so I guess I'm just not worthy of drinking at Yahoo's drinking fountains.

<hr>

On a side note - and this is nobody's fault but mine - I've come to realise lately that I've been "watching my mouth" a little, even to the point of subconsciously censoring myself a little in my forum posts, out of concern for what some people might think of me. I don't know what the hell prompted me to start doing that. The reason I started Social Deviancy in the first place was because I value my freedom of speech and my right to express any of my opinions, no matter how vile those opinions may seem to some - or even most - people. I don't give a shit what people think of me, or whether or not they agree with or even feel they can tolerate my point of view - I deserve a place to express them, and SocDev is that place. Again, this is not a dig at anybody here - I just sort of fell into this habit myself, through nobody's fault but mine.

But be warned people - this ends here. SocDev wasn't designed for tea parties and pleasant yet witty repartée. It was designed as an open community where anybody, myself included, can act in deviation of society's acceptable standards if they so choose, without fear or repercussion or reprisal. If I lose a few of my small number of regular users because they find they don't like what I say or the way I say it, then it's a small price to pay for being honest to myself.

So be warned, you pussies and bitches - the Mr. Nice Guy act ends here.

Venomous wrote:Granted, it's possible these days to download and install Internet Explorer for Linux or Mac. But why would you?

Actually, a native Linux release was never made (you can run the windows one with WINE, but outside of the novelty factor, no one does), and for the Mac version, even Microsoft recommends that you DO NOT use it.

Venomous wrote:
Now really, what the fuck?? Seven day "free" trial with automatic credit card rebilling after the trial period?? Come ON, I'd expect this from a shady porno site, or even a warez site, but from Yahoo, one of the internet's industry leaders?? Yuck!!

Expect it. Most net companies anymore will rape you faster than you can blink.

Venomous wrote:
I have absolutely ZERO tolerance for this kind of bullshit. I mean COME ON. This is the fucking internet! The global community! We live in an age where an old woman in Slovenia can sell hand woven shawls all over the globe without having to leave her own home, and yet one of the biggest companies in the world says I can only listen to the free version of their radio station, but not the paid version, because I happen to be logging in from outside the continental USA?

Blame the aussies equivilent of the RIAA for that. Hell, iTunes recently was just opened up to Australia because the music industry over there felt they wanted a bigger chunk than anyone else (even the greedy RIAA) took, and still fiddle fucked around.

Venomous wrote:
But be warned people - this ends here. SocDev wasn't designed for tea parties and pleasant yet witty repartée. It was designed as an open community where anybody, myself included, can act in deviation of society's acceptable standards if they so choose, without fear or repercussion or reprisal. If I lose a few of my small number of regular users because they find they don't like what I say or the way I say it, then it's a small price to pay for being honest to myself.

I don't think anyone's gonna leave because you wish to give us freedom. If they do, we don't need them here.

fuck yahoo man.. I never really liked their service because they would always have hidden "seekers" (cant think of the technical term at this point) that would search your computer for information about you and try to track cookies etc.

I was actually pretty much the last person I know to convert to Googleism. I'd always been an Altavista man, die hard. Until they eventually sold out and began just mirroring Yahoo's search, at which point I finally made the leap over to Google, and have never looked back.

I read some article in some crappy pseudo-spam newsletter I ended up on as a result of some stupid search engine submission, which said that Google is generally perceived by the public as the "good guy" of internet corporations, compared to the "evil empires" that are MS, AOL, Yahoo, etc. But the more industries Google starts to dip its fingers in, the more it starts to scare people, and that its "harmless" image is starting to fade now as Google grows.

The article also said that while Google may be starting to become the next Microsoft, Wikipedia may be becoming the next Google.

Man, the things you learn while you're manually deleting your spam. Did you know also that apparently erectile disfunction is a thing of the past, due to the miracles of soft-tab Cialis? =P

Speaking of trivia... word of advice for Windows users: I just found out the hard way, but apparently Ctrl-Q has the same effect as Alt-F4 in Windows. Somehow, when I tried to type the Shift-W for "Wikipedia", my right hand hit Ctrl instead of Shift, and my left hand hit Q instead of W, and bye-bye my entire post. How fucking annoying.

Venomous wrote:Speaking of trivia... word of advice for Windows users: I just found out the hard way, but apparently Ctrl-Q has the same effect as Alt-F4 in Windows. Somehow, when I tried to type the Shift-W for "Wikipedia", my right hand hit Ctrl instead of Shift, and my left hand hit Q instead of W, and bye-bye my entire post. How fucking annoying.

long ass post I was typing on my laptop and hit Ctrl-w instead of Shift-w(and bye bye window)
fuck it it'll have to wait till thursday or friday.

well all i can say is fuck yahoo .... there no better than microduster ....... well if anything im sure someone by the time they do offer it to you will have figured out how to hax that shit and get u it for free........ i guess u can look at it that way.........